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For Immediate Release

Letter to President Bush Urges Leadership on Millenium Development Goals

Cambridge, Mass - 09/22/2008

PHR joins other NGOs in urging President Bush to assert bold and thoughtful leadership when nations convene at the UN in September 2008, to chart a course to accelerate action on the Millenium Development Goals. The MDGs promote poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases, but without "urgent and concerted action” by all nations, the MDGs will not be achieved by the target date of 2015.

The NGOs urge Pres. Bush to give special consideration to the steps that are yet to be taken within the United States and globally to save the lives of millions of women who die needlessly in pregnancy and childbirth each decade, almost always for lack of the amount and quality of care taken for granted by all but the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. An important contributing factor in that lack of care is the dearth of trained and available health workers such as professional midwives. The NGOs further request that Pres. Bush represent these concerns and raise the appeal that all nations move from pledges and promises to decisions and actions which will sustain tangible results.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is an independent organization that uses medicine and science to stop mass atrocities and severe human rights violations against individuals. We are supported by the expertise and passion of health professionals and concerned citizens alike.

Since 1986, PHR has conducted investigations in more than 40 countries around the world, including Afghanistan, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, the United States, the former Yugoslavia, and Zimbabwe.

  • 1988 — First to document Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Kurds
  • 1996 — Exhumed mass graves in the Balkans
  • 1996 — Produced critical forensic evidence of genocide in Rwanda
  • 1997 — Shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines
  • 2003 — Warned of health and human rights catastrophe prior to the invasion of Iraq
  • 2004 — Documented and analyzed the genocide in Darfur
  • 2005 — Detailed the story of tortured detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay
  • 2010 — Investigated the epidemic of violence spread by Burma’s military junta
  • 2011 — Championed the principle of noninterference with medical services
                  in times of armed conflict and civil unrest during the Arab Spring
  • 2012 — Trained doctors, lawyers, police, and judges in the Democratic Republic of
                  the Congo, Kenya, and Syria on the proper collection of evidence in
                  sexual violence cases
  • 2013 — Won first prize in the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention with MediCapt,
                  our mobile app that documents evidence of torture and sexual violence

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